Hey everyone! First, I want to congratulate all of the maintainers and contributors on the release of 4.3, it’s a really cool release, and the multi-threaded resource loading being fixed is an absolute life-saver for me, so thank you to everyone that made this release happen
I’m the developer of a game called Tabletop Club, which is currently running on a version of Godot that could now be considered ancient , which is 3.4.5.
As I was starting a complete re-write of my game, Godot 4.0 had just come out, and while it was a huge release for many reasons, due to its size it was pretty buggy on release, which is completely understandable - but because of this, I decided to stick with 3.x for my re-write as it was a lot more stable and reliable, and currently I’m using Godot 3.5.3.
With the context out of the way, my question is: Is it now worth switching to Godot 4.x if I’m looking for stability?
I’m still part of the way through re-writing my game, and I feel like it would be better in the long run if I start migrating the project now, rather than completing the re-write in 3.5, and then essentially re-writing it all over again in 4.3 to use the new features…
Although, whether I migrate the project now pretty much solely depends on 4.x’s stability. How has it been for you guys? Are there still any major, glaring issues still prevelant in the 4.3 release, or has it been smooth sailing as of late?
Loving the look of Tabletop Club, especially that outdoor chess. Looks like you’ve been extremely busy, with the trailer showing an absolute tonne of interesting features.
Having started my Godot journey on 4.0, 4.3 seems pretty stable to me. I’ll be releasing my first game, Unicopia, using Godot 4.3 in about 6 weeks, and the engine and IDE have been stable enough since at least 4.1 for a 2D game, and I suspect it’s a similar story for 3D.
The IDE used to crash a bit, back around 4.1, and there’s been a few dead end changes that the Godot team have had to roll back (looking at you, Web builds and SharedArrayBuffers) but on the whole I’ve found 4.x reliable.
That said, game engines are so complex it seems to be there’s always a bit of flux in feature stability across releases, so your mileage might vary. For me the worst gotcha I came across was Binary tokenization on export was reintroduced in 4.3 and enabled by default. As it reintroduced problems with localised resources, it broke my asian fonts, and it took me forever to find the issue, which was quickly fixed by disabling binary tokenization.
Nonetheless, if 4.3 has features you need, or if you have long-term plans for Tabletop Club, then I’d personally recommend you consider migrating across.
Thank you! I like the look of Unicopia, it’s giving me very “Pony Island” vibes from the CRT-look of the game
What you said is very true, even if I do switch then there will 100% be bugs that I come across - but in fairness, there were also some annoying things in 3.4.5 that I needed to modify the source code to fix, and it will likely be the same if I switch to 4.x, if I had to guess.
So I’ll keep things like the binary tokenization in mind for sure, as a big part of the reason why I wanted to switch to Godot 4 in the first place is for better localisation, that is, added support for right-to-left languages like Arabic, as well as font variants for differing character glyphs between languages like Chinese and Japanese.
There’s a few other reasons as well, but for the most part, since I’m rewriting the entire game anyways, I want to at the very least get it to a state where I don’t need to re-write it again for a while and just gradually improve it over time, and I think switching to 4.x now makes a lot of sense with that in mind.
Although I haven’t tried any right-to-left languages, Godot 4 does a pretty awesome job working with Latin, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts.
And if you’re re-writing the game anyway, Godot 4.3 would be a great place to start. While I’m not sure what’s on the roadmap for 4.4+, it feels like 4.3 is a major milestone in the 4.x lineage.
, which is 3.4.5.
I like the look of Unicopia, it’s giving me very “Pony Island” vibes from the CRT-look of the game 